Marlborough, MA -based gyroscope maker Qualtre, a producer of micro-electromechanical system gyroscopes, raises $8 Million in a Series B round of investment led by Matrix Partners and Pilot House Ventures.

Boston’s Currensee, a social network for foreign exchange traders, raises $8.8 Million in a Series B round of investment led by Vernon & Park Capital, North Bridge Venture Partners, and Egan Managed Capital.

There are 13 companies listed in this year’s Fortune 500 index of America’s largest corporations. The chart below lists all 13 Massachusetts-based companies that are in the Fortune 500, their headquarters town in Massachusetts, their rank in the Fortune 500, their 2008 revenues (in millions), and number of employees.

We can see that the 13 corporations in the Fortune 500 index of America’s largest corporations that are based in Massachusetts had combined 2008 revenues of $193 Billion dollars and employed a combined 530,000 people worldwide.

Waltham was the Massachusetts city with the most Fortune 500 company headquarters based within its borders, with three of the companies listed being based in the Watch City. Two were based in Cambridge, two in Framingham, two in Natick, two in Boston, and one each in Springfield and Hopkington.

Thirteen Massachusetts based companies are listed on the Fortune 500 index of America's largest corporations

The publicly traded company has seen its stock nearly double over the past year. The company has genetically engineered a microbe that eats sugar from corn and generates a plastic-like molecule called PHA. After a few months, the bioplastic will decompose in water or soil and is so pure that waste containers made with the material are safe for use in backyard composting heaps. Metabolix also claims its bioplastic is carbon neutral.

The company has entered into a joint venture with the Archer Daniels Midland company (ADM) which is called Telles. The venture will begin shipping their “Mirel” bioplastic pellets from a new plant in Clinton, Iowa. Newell Rubbermaid’s Paper Mate division is one of the first customers, using the Mirel bioplastic pellets in a resin form for their new $1.25 biodegradeable Paper Mate pens.

Metabolix charges around $2.50 a pound for its green bioplastic, about twice the price of traditional plastics. But increased customer demand for “Green” products and biodegradeable items is so strong in many cases that lower margins can be made up for by increased unit sales.

Metabolix creates products that are genetically modified – a taboo in many environmentalist circles. And, as the demand for bioplastics increases, many worry that the demand for corn, already being used increasingly for ethanol production, will rise even more dramatically, driving up food prices.

Metabolix is working to address these concerns by researching next generation plastics made from nonfood material such as prairie switchgrass.

Turbine Inc., one of the Boston area’s biggest video game companies, has been acquired by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment Inc. of Burbank, Calif., a business unit of Time Warner Inc.

The deal underscores Greater Boston’s increasing prominence as a center for video game development. Financial details of the deal were not released, but a source close to the negotiations said that Warner Bros. will pay as much as $160 million, including sums to be paid to Turbine shareholders in future years if the company meets certain financial targets.

Turbine, a privately-held, venture-backed company in Westwood, is one of the leading makers of Internet-based, multi-player adventure games. The company produces Lord of the Rings Online, Dungeons & Dragons Online, and Asheron’s Call. Thousands of players subscribe to Lord of the Rings and Asheron’s Call, paying monthly fees of around $15 for the right to play and socialize with one another online. More than one million players play Dungeons & Dragons Online.

Acquiring Turbine will give Warner Bros. total control over all future video games based on author J.R.R. Tolkien’s beloved Lord of the Rings novels. Turbine holds an exclusive license to make an Internet-based game based on the books, while last year, Warner Bros. won a license to make non-Internet-based Tolkien video games.

Warner Bros. Interactive has bought a number of game development houses in recent years, in a bid to become a major power in video gaming. In 2007, the company purchased TT Games, a British firm that develops family-friendly products like Lego Star Wars and Lego Batman. In 2009, Warner Bros. bought the assets of bankrupt Chicago game company Midway, maker of the popular Mortal Kombat games. And earlier this year, it acquired a majority stake in Rocksteady Studios, another British developer, which created the hit game Batman: Arkham Asylum.

TwinStrata, Inc., founded in 2007 and based in Natick, Massachusetts, debuts today at the Cloud Expo in NYC with its vision for intelligent storage cloudsolutions. Taking an innovative approach, the company is bringing to market cloud storage enablement software solutions to help mid-sized companies in a variety of industries address challenges related to protecting and managing the growth of business application data.

The software company develops software products for planning and deployment of data availability solutions. It offers CloudArray software, a software-based iSCSI cloud storage data gateway that presents block-based storage to applications, provides solution to protect and store data, and supports data protection and archiving applications; PHD Virtual esXpress and Vizioncore vRanger Pro data protection platform for backup, recovery, and data archiving; and Veeam backup and replication solutions. The company also provides Clarity AP assessment and planning software for disaster recovery assessment and planning. TwinStrata, Inc. solutions provide application connectivity to private and public cloud storage by delivering a software data gateway to enable integration with in-house information technology (IT) and data availability. It offers its products through a network of IT service providers, systems integrators, original equipment manufacturers, and direct to end users, as well as through its Website.

TwinStrata is a market innovator producing storage solutions for the data center enabling application data flexibility and agility for today’s business needs and tomorrow’s growth. Its flagship product, CloudArray software, enables companies to take advantage of dynamic and cost effective Cloud storage resources and accommodate application data growth with little to no capital investment in IT infrastructure. TwinStrata solutions are designed to meet the needs of mid-sized businesses on up to large enterprise infrastructures.

TwinStrata offers its products through a network of IT service providers, systems integrators, OEMs, direct to end users and through its own Website. TwinStrata is a privately held software company with offices in Natick, Massachusetts that brings together years of expertise in enterprise storage systems.

TwinStrata is a pioneer in the Cloud Storage Enablement (CSE) market with the industry’s first purpose-built architecture and software solution to enable Intelligent Storage Clouds (ISC). ISC deliver simple, affordable and secure storage solutions to enterprise environments. TwinStrata’s solutions address the business need for on-demand IT services, providing new levels of business agility, efficiency, IT alignment and cost management for protecting and managing the growth of business application data. For more information about TwinStrata:

Today’s IT data management teams are tasked with selecting solutions that maintain the integrity and availability of data, especially higher value data related to business critical applications. Storage-related solutions need to easily and quickly scale to accommodate future data growth and not require capital intensive upgrades when capacity limits are reached. They must support multiple data formats for all types of business applications. In addition, companies should understand the impact an application outage will have on each line-of-business or on the company as a whole in order to implement appropriate data recovery operations.

Cloud Technology Ecosystems

To help companies achieve business agility and efficiency, IT alignment and cost management, several ecosystems started by industry-leading vendors have emerged. EMC with its EMC Atmos Velocity Program and Amazon with its Amazon Web Services are each an example of an ecosystem of solution providers developing cloud enablement solutions that leverage their respective cloud services. These ecosystems will have a significant impact on storage cloud adoption.

Corporations using solutions from these ecosystems benefit from the cloud. They can now instantly respond to changing business requirements by taking advantage of an adaptable infrastructure and adding resources as needed. Storage cloud infrastructures eliminate lengthy change management cycles when bringing new storage infrastructure online and optimize IT administrative processes to drive efficiency and improve staff productivity.

“Cloud enablement solutions, like the one TwinStrata offers, will help accelerate corporate cloud storage adoption,” said Terri McClure, a senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. “Companies can realize the availability, security and performance characteristics of local storage, without the capital investment and overhead of housing and managing storage themselves.”

“TwinStrata is working with customers around the world and with industry-leading global technology companies to define and develop intelligent storage cloud architectures and solutions,” said TwinStrata CEO & Co-Founder Nicos Vekiarides.

“The EMC Velocity2 Atmos Partner Program demonstrates our commitment to deliver innovative storage solutions that address the growing needs of our partners seeking to leverage cloud infrastructure. We believe there is an opportunity and approach to cloud storage that delivers financial and functional benefits to both our Partners and the Customers they serve,” said Mike Feinberg, Senior Vice President of EMC Cloud Infrastructure Group. “By making our cloud infrastructure accessible and allowing easy API integration, we enable our partners to develop cloud enablement solutions to help customers realize business agility, drive IT operational efficiency, and improve cost controls. We are pleased to work with TwinStrata to embrace and deliver real-world business value to our joint customers, globally.”

Verizon Communications Inc. says it plans to start building a new research center in Waltham, Massachusetts focused around 4G wireless Long Term Evolution (LTE) technology. Verizon Wireless currently is piloting an LTE network deployment in parts of Boston. The new Verizon Waltham Technology Innovation Center will eventually house more than 300 scientists and researchers, officials said, most of whom are already working for Verizon in two exisitng buildings at that location.

In addition to its LTE research, the new Waltham campus will house researchers working on other Verizon offerings. LTE is the major focus of that building, but there will also be other Verizon work going on, including the further development of FiOS.

The campus at 117 West St. in Waltham will include three buildings once the new one is finished. In addition to the research space, it will house offices, as well as an executive briefing center.

As of August 2009, Verizon had 10 LTE 4G cell sites running around Greater Boston in its pilot deployment. LTE wireless service is expected to provide up to 10 times the speed – or about 8 megabits per second – of current 3G services. In March, Verizon announced that in its pilot deployments it was seeing average speeds of between 5Mbps and 12Mbps on a download in real world use, with peaks as high as 50Mbps.

Concord’s Spaceclaim, a provider of 3D direct modeling solutions, raises $5 Million in a Series D round of funding from a group of investors including Borealis Ventures, Kodiak Venture Partners, Needham Capital Partners, and North Bridge Venture Partners.

Lexington’s Daily Grommet, an online marketplace and video review company, raises $3.4 Million in a Series A round of funding from a group of investors including LaunchCapital, Gerry Laybourne, Hub Angels, Lead Dog Ventures, and Boston Golden Seeds.

Beverley’s ecommerce startup Searchandise Commerce raises $7 Million from a group of investors lead by new investor Madrona Venture Group. The financing also had backing from return investors Cloquet Capital Partners LLC, DFJ Gotham Partners, Draper Associates, Milestone Venture Partners, Inflection Point Ventures and Wheatley Partners. As part of the funding round, Madrona managing director Brian McAndrews will join the Searchandise board of directors.

The Beverly-based company, which focuses on search-based e-commerce, said in a press release that it plans to direct the funding toward growing the sales and marketing, as well as operations.

Searchandise Commerce offers a product ad network and uses a cost-per-click system of placing searches on the company’s SearchNet network of comparison shopping engines and retailers. Searchandise has changed its name from Guidester Inc. and shifted its focus from its previous role as a navigational tools company.

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Nokia acquires Cambridge’s Metacarta for an undisclosed sum. MetaCarta, a 30-person company based in Cambridge, Mass., specializes in geographic intelligence and location-aware services — both of which should play well with Nokia’s recent emphasis on location technologies for its mobile devices.

Details on how Nokia plans to integrate MetaCarta’s technology were scant Friday. In a statement, Nokia said that it will “be used in the area of local search in location and other services.”

MetaCarta’s two principal software offerings are Geosearch, which organizes and presents information about a particular location, and Geotag, which extracts geographic information from Web content for use in other applications, such as maps.

Location-aware services have become a renewed focus for Nokia as it looks to expand those capabilities for its mobile phones. Back in January, Nokia updated Ovi Maps, and said in early February that the new version had been downloaded more than 1.4 million times in the span of two weeks. Among Ovi Maps’ newer features were turn-by-turn GPS navigation.

The Oracle Corporation has agreed to buy Phase Forward, which makes software used to manage clinical drug trials, for $685 million, the companies said Friday. Oracle, the leading maker of database software, plans to add Phase Forward to its Health Sciences unit. Oracle is paying $17 a share in cash for Phase Forward’s stock, 30 percent more than the $13.08 closing price Thursday. Stock in Phase Forward, which is based in Waltham, Mass., rose $3.72, or 28.4 percent, to $16.80 a share. Stock in Oracle, based in Redwood City, Calif., fell 25 cents to $25.95 a share.

The Phase Forward purchase may help Oracle tap into a growing market for programs that helps make the U.S. health-care system more efficient, said Cross Research analyst Richard Williams. Oracle Chief Executive Officer Larry Ellison, 65, has spent about $42 billion buying 62 companies since January 2005.

Phase Forward delivers its software as a service over the Internet, helping researchers, physicians and regulators access and share data for clinical trials. The company’s programs have been used in more than 10,000 clinical trials by more than 300 companies and organizations, including AstraZeneca Plc, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and GlaxoSmithKline Plc.

Phase Forward, founded in 1997, will become part of Oracle’s Health Sciences Global business unit. Oracle, based in Redwood City, California, expects to close the deal in mid-2010.

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PMO Director. These are my personal thoughts about software development, technology and related topics that interest me. In general, you will find a bias towards project management related issues and lots of talk about interacting with stakeholders or programmers. I try to present a technical view from a user's perspective. The views presented here on my professional and personal blog represent my own views and experiences and not those of my employer.